In earlier entries on The Middle Class Forum the questions of “Why not dictatorship?” and “Why not paternal democracy?” were raised. Life would be easier if we could just trust in a few individuals to do a good job of running the country while we all get on with our own separate lives. Trusting in [...]
Question: When is a liberty no longer a liberty? Answer: When it turns into a special interest. During this past week I attended the NEARC conference in Hyannis, Massachusetts. I am GIS specialist, a computer cartographer, and this conference featured different applications of the GIS software we use. A veritable smorgasbord of applications are presented [...]
John Locke delineated what has become the most famous list of our “natural rights.” These are life, liberty and property. The problem with this list is that none of them are natural rights, as referred to in the previous entry. Nature granted us opposable thumbs to adapt our labors in various, wonderful ways without exploitation. [...]
You don’t see many comments in reply to my posts. There are various reasons for that. A spam filter eliminates many. For all I know some of those may be legitimate but I’m not going to weed through the large volume of spam to check. Of the few that make it through, almost no one [...]
The trend on Presidential campaign spending was previously provided on The Middle Class Forum. While basic economic indicators have inflated by a factor between 9 and 10 since the mid-seventies, buying a presidential election has gone up by 13 times. The extra inflation is due to extra efforts to provide misinformation. Genuine information, if particularly [...]
Continue reading about Political Trends – Congressional Campaign Spending
In the last entry I claimed that financial institutions and corporations do dumb things, but that is a matter of perspective. When markets crash, they behave much like bacteria in a petri dish. The bacteria will grow exponentially until they have used up more resources in their closed environment than can sustain them. They will [...]
Misinformation causes markets to crash in many ways. The most obvious way stems from unrealistic expectations of growth. But there are checks and balances to our economic system just as there are with our political system. For the obvious problem of growth misinformation to have much impact there lies behind it a more insidious problem [...]
I started off with the short answer to why markets crash: markets flooded with capital not backed by economic productivity. Data from the National Income and Product Accounts tables revealed that net dividends have inflated way beyond the pace of domestic productivity and personal income. The next few entries explained the causes for flooding capital [...]
Continue reading about Why Markets Crash – Laissez Faire Economics
The Middle Class Forum has brought up the problem of too much credit available to the middle class in the past. When is credit too much? Going by the last entry in this series, there is too much credit when it cannot stimulate future productivity –By the way, if you have wondered why I pompously [...]
The short answer to why markets crash is that capital has flooded markets without being backed by economic productivity. The data supporting that this has happened was presented in with the first entry in this series. Two of the four causes for flooding markets with capital are exploitation of production at home and abroad, as [...]
Continue reading about Why Markets Crash – Credit from Abroad